Elliptic Personal Pronoun and MT in Arabic

Arabic is a relatively free-word order language allowing the positioning of the subject either before its owner verb or after it. Whenever the subject precedes its verb, a personal pronoun has to be associated with the verb to play the role of its subject and enable the proper construction of the full verbal sentence. Sometimes such subject pronoun is explicit, appearing as a suffix to the verb, and in other cases the pronoun is "elliptic", giving rise to a major syntactic ambiguity. In the latter case, failing to reach the right decision of whether there is an elliptic personal pronoun or not, can lead to a wrong attachment of the immediate succeeding noun phrase as a subject instead of an object or vice versa. The current paper will present some aspects of this problem and will address some of the solutions adopted by Sakhr in its Arabic syntactic analyzer within the scope of its Arabic-English Machine Translation System.